Dreaded Purple Master

 A friend of mine just bought a satellite dish, giving himself another 500 or so channels. One of those channels is Encore WAM!, which features young peoples' programming from around the world.

And, as is no surprise to Julia fans, WAM! carries the series that was Julia's big break, Press Gang (1988-1993). When my friend saw this page, he quietly started taping episodes to surprise me with.

I was floored.

Thumbnail synopses do not do justice to this series, a light drama set in the offices of the Junior Gazette, a by-and-for-students' edition of the local newspaper. Julia is Lynda Day, the editor; the male lead, Spike Thompson, was played by her then-boyfriend, Dexter Fletcher. The dramatic tension of the series arose from the struggle to publish a newspaper with little to no resources ... and the off-and-on relationship between Lynda and Spike. (It is romantic tension, not sexual tension, and it's refreshing to see that series writer Steven Moffat knows the difference.)

This is not a program full of kids pretending to be reporters while adults nod sagely and indulgently from the Real World. As the series progresses, you'll find it easy to forget that these are teenagers.

And by the time the fifth and final season rolls by, Press Gang has evolved into a tightly-written dramatic half-hour. In "A Quarter to Midnight", Lynda is in the middle of an investigation when she is accidentally locked in an airtight vault. Her cellular phone could have saved her, but it's broken; she can call out, but she can't be heard. Spike dismisses her calls for help -- the phone rings, he answers, and no one is there -- as crank calls. He and the rest of the staff must deduce the danger and her location from the sparse notes on her desk (buried under everything else on her desk) before her air runs out.

And then there's "There Are Crocodiles", the final show of the series, in which a drug-related death in the washroom threatens the continued existence of the Junior Gazette. This riveting half-hour compares favorably to anything ostensibly created for the adult viewer.

Plus, Julia is terminally cute. :) 

More about Julia

• The Unofficial Julia Sawalha Homepage
• THE Julia Sawalha Pages
• The Absolutely Fabulous Saffron
• Stairways Shareware Mailing Lists
• Cadfael's Julia Sawalha Pages
• The Unofficial Press Gang Page